What exactly are WordPress tags and categories? What purpose should they serve for the reader? Should they each just be one word? How do tags and categories relate to each other? And what does all this mean for SEO?

What’s the Difference Between WordPress Tags And Categories?

Categories are like the aisles in a grocery store and tags are like the ingredients in the various different foods. Chinese chili sauce is only located in the ethnic foods aisles, but garlic (an ingredient) is found in the chips aisle, the frozen dinners aisle, and the vegetable aisle.

Tags (ingredients) link together all of your posts (food items) across your categories (aisles).

According to WordPress, tags “make it easier for people to find your content. Tags are similar to, but more specific than, categories.”

Categories and tags also influence how your blog posts rank in search engines.

How to Create Effective WordPress Tags

Examples of useful tags include “no-kill dog shelter”, “adoptable dogs”, and“Australian Cattle Hounds”. Examples of bad tags include “dog“, “shelter”, and“transportation”. The idea is to write tags that are highly specific, and can stand on their own.

This way, your readers can find the content they’re looking for much more quickly. Plus, someone looking to adopt an Australian Cattle Hound will never type “dog”into a search engine.

There are at least three purposes that tags serve:

1. Put your readers before anything else. Ask yourself this: If someone clicked on your tag, will the tag archive be what they’re looking for?
2. Use existing tags first. To avoid redundant tags, use an existing tag before creating a new one. WordPress makes this easy with an auto-complete feature and a tag-cloud – both display tags you’re already written.
3. Make a regular habit of deleting tags that are redundant or too general. Search by topic in your tags panel and weed everything out until you have a few highly specific tags for that topic.

Three useful WordPress plugins for tags

If you do use WordPress, there are several plugins that can create powerful experiences for readers using tags. Configurable Tag Cloud and Opacity Tags are my personal favorites. If you need to delete unused tags, check out theMass Delete Unused Tags plugin.

How to Create Effective WordPress Categories

A dog shelter blog I recently visited included the following categories in the sidebar:“Hairy”, “Declawed”, “Thoughts”. The problem with these categories – and it’s a very common problem – is that they don’t help the reader.

There are at least three purposes that categories serve:

1. Categories help you communicate to readers what your blog is about. And if people can’t figure this out, they will quickly leave. Categories can be used to create a hierarchal navigation menu in your header or sidebar which quickly communicates the topics your blog covers.
2. Categories help you control where people click on your site. Don’t forget that the purpose of your website is to direct visitors down specific paths of action. You decide which categories to include in your navigation. You decide which categories to display on specific sidebars within your site.
3. Categories help you get found on Google. Google uses your categories to help index your website content. Google also looks at the topical relationship of all your categories as well, so the dog shelter mentioned about might move their “Thoughts” content to another blog.

Four things you can do now to improve your categories:

1. Make them clear. Edit your categories so that they are broad enough to cover the larger topics you blog about, but specific enough so that people can know what they’re going to get when they click on the category page.
2. Consolidate categories. Through the process of renaming your categories, you will no doubt find useless categories. Remove the posts from these categories put them somewhere else and delete these useless categories.
3. Clean your slugs. Slugs are the simple URL structure associated with the category. Remove words like “a” and “the. This will help improve the URL structure for search engines. There are also plugins to help clean up your slugs.
4. Start another blog. If you find yourself writing blog posts about topics unrelated to your website, consider starting a personal blog. Again, your readers and Google look for the prevailing themes of your blog when deciding to subscribe or rank. If there’s not cohesive theme, you’re in trouble.

Optimizing categories and tags on your site is a lot of work, but the enhanced search rankings and enhanced reader experience are well worth the toil.

How are you using categories and tags?

Check out these related articles:

• The Ultimate Facebook Ad Guide For Fundraising Events
• The Ultimate Last-Minute #GivingTuesday Campaign Checklist
• Pinterest Analytics Explained – A Video Guide for Beginners

The post WordPress Tags And Categories – The Ultimate Guide For Nonprofits appeared first on Socialbrite.

By Caroline Avakian / Photo above courtesy of Facebook

It was just a few hours after I found out about the devastating Nepal earthquake that I noticed an alert on my Facebook feed that I hadn’t seen before. My colleague who works in Nepal had been marked “Safe” in Facebook’s new “Safety Check” feature, that instantly let me know how many of my Facebook friends were in the “affected area”, how many had been “marked safe”, and also allowed me to mark myself safe in the event I was in the “affected area”.

The Safety Check feature was quickly followed up by a “Donate” feature, so if you log into Facebook today, you’ll notice a message at the top of your news feed that lets you donate to International Medical Corps, a humanitarian organization Facebook has partnered with to provide emergency aid. Facebook is also providing matching funds of up to two million to provide immediate and ongoing relief. The IMCs emergency response teams are operating mobile medical units in Nepal, India and Bangladesh, to deliver critically needed medical care and medicines to the regions hardest-hit by the earthquake. They’re distributing hygiene kits, water purification tablets and other supplies to the most devastated areas.

The post How social media platforms are responding to the Nepal earthquake, and how you can help appeared first on Socialbrite.

Although Facebook has decreased newsfeed exposure (reach) for Facebook Pages, they have increased newsfeed exposure for links people share with their Facebook friends.

Right now, take a look at your own News Feed and look at the number of links from friends versus links from Pages. My News Feed has 1 link (or less) from a Page for every 10 links from friends. Clearly, Facebook puts my friends first in the News Feed.

All this link-sharing has made Facebook the number one source of social referral traffic. In fact, a recent study from Shareaholic shows that Facebook now drives more than 25% of all website traffic (see below).

An excellent example of a nonprofit using a blog for content marketing is To Write Love on Her Arms, an organization that gives hope and help to people struggling with depression, addiction and suicide. They publish posts every day that are bothinspiring and useful. Check out the most recent posts:

How Does Blogging Increase Website Traffic?

When people read TWLOHA’s posts, quite naturally some click “like” if they like what they’re reading.

Each time this happens, an update is posted in Facebook’s news feed, driving Facebook visitors back to the website (as shown below).

But these are not just any website visitor. They are friends that your community invited to your website when they clicked a like button!  They are birds of a similar feather, which you want.

Three Ways to Increase Website Traffic From Facebook

So where do you start? After you’re confident that your website has content worth sharing, begin by adding like buttons, sharing prompts, and Facebook comments.

1. Add Like Buttons to Your Website Content

Putting a like button on all of your website content is probably the number one way to drive website traffic from Facebook, in the long run.

You can add Facebook like buttons to your content by generating code on Facebook’s developer site (shown below). If you use WordPress, you can choose from a variety of plugins that automatically add like buttons to your content (I like JetPack).

2. Add Facebook Sharing Popups to Your Website Content

Let’s say you have a big event coming up, and you want to drive your community (and their friends) to a landing page about the campaign. You have many ways that you’ll be doing this, including making it easy for people to share that landing page with their friends.

You can do this easily and strategically by embedding sharing links in various webpages and blog post on your website.

To create Facebook sharing links, follow these instructions:

1. Type the following link in a plain text document: https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=
2. Enter your landing page URL after “?u=“. For example, https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=http://blogs.bestfriends.org/post-name/ creates a news feed post (as shown below).
3. Embed URL into text or image
4. Test sharing

3. Add Facebook Commenting to your Website Content

Another way you can drive more traffic to your website is by adding Facebook commenting two webpages on your website. Like the like button, each time someone leaves a comment using the Facebook comment plug-in, a link to your website is shared on Facebook.

You can create code using Facebook’s comments plugin, or if you use WordPress, you can use a WordPress plugin.

What do you think?

Comment below with your brilliant idea, question, or cool example of a nonprofit website.

The post Three simple ways to dramatically increase website traffic from Facebook appeared first on Socialbrite.

Make sure your nonprofit is directly related to the cause you’re promoting

Guest post by Chelsea Whitaker
SankyNet

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, educators, Google AdWords advertisers.

For many nonprofits, search engine marketing is an important part of your online acquisition strategy. By bidding on mission-specific keywords, organizations run a short text ad as a “paid search placement” or “sponsored search result” on the search engines Google, Bing or Yahoo.

This can be a powerful tool, but there is a learning curve that many nonprofits find hard to navigate. Google Grants gives nonprofits a budget of up to $10,000 a month to work with, but it doesn’t come with easy “how-to” manual, leaving many organizations struggling with unfamiliar terminology and intimidating interface.

To further complicate things, search engine marketing is widely used by commercial services, shopping sites and just about anyone selling anything online – and these for-profit companies work with larger budgets as they compete for the coveted top-placed ad.

How Keyword Insertion works

Search for any term, and you get a range of ads, some of them relevant and some of them not. But the key is that they are specific to your search keywords – hitting you with targeted messaging when you are already seeking out that information. Some ads may even look too specific to your query – even replicating the exact language you typed into the search box. This is a technique called “Keyword Insertion.”

Using a snippet of code when setting up a Google Adwords or Microsoft AdCenter ad, the advertiser pulls the user’s actual search terms and replaces part of the ad with the user-generated text. Data shows this is very effective – after all, what is more relevant to your search than the actual term you are looking for?

For nonprofits, it’s essential to maintain integrity and avoid keywords that could be problematic when inserted into an ad. For example, don’t insert keywords into ads when bidding on terms that are related to your cause, but not actually a part of it. An example would be inserting the keyword “sponsor a child” when your organization provides direct aid, not child sponsorship. A misled or confused searcher will likely not be sympathetic to your cause.

Keyword failure: The downside of relevance

But many for-profit companies have no such reservations about inserting as many relevant keywords as possible, often across a wide range of topics. “Local” and “Buy now” kinds of sites, which aggregate products and services across various markets, are notorious for bidding high for thousands of keywords, and using one generic ad with keyword insertion for them all. A nonprofit may want to bid on “Starving children” but a local service aggregator may also bid on “Starving” trying to target hungry shoppers. The result? Something we like to call “Keyword Insertion Failure.”

Take a look at the right at our favorite “fails” for some keywords that fit into many nonprofits’ missions: Words in bold are the search terms appearing in the ads. Then try your own hand at Google and Bing.

How do your search terms stack up in a Google search?

The post The right and wrong way to do Google AdWords appeared first on Socialbrite.

Social media, data & messaging are among the key ingredients

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, social media strategists, educators.

Guest post by Mary Joyce

Whether you run a nonprofit, a social enterprise or a cause organization, it’s likely that at some point you run up against the barrier we’ve all faced: How do I get the word out about this amazing campaign?

Here are seven steps that we’ve found make a good blueprint on how to build visibility and awareness so that you can then move people to take action and create impact.

Identify your targets and supporters

1There are two types of audiences that you most likely need to take action for you to achieve your goal: targets and supporters. Targets are the people who have the direct power to give you what you want. They are often officials who have the authority to make policy changes. The target could be a government minister or the principal of your school. When the target takes action, your goal is achieved.

Supporters are people who help who you achieve your goal by putting pressure on the target. These could be sympathetic politicians, the students in your class, or civic organizations that care about your cause.

Segment your audiences

Photo courtesy of thinkjose (Creative Commons)

2Segmenting means breaking an audience down into smaller groups that share common characteristics. You can segment your audience down even further than just targets versus supporters. In fact, the more you segment, the more you can tailor your message to the specific priorities of a given group. For example, you might separate your “student” audience group into students who care about the environment, members of student government, and students who write for the school paper. You would present a different message to each group.

Segmenting is only limited by time and human resources. Since each segment will need its own messaging arc, and creating 10 of these will be more work than creating only one, you should be sure not to create any more segments than you have the time or resources to create content for and respond to.

Establish a messaging arc

3The message arc is a multimessage narrative that takes your audience from where they are (not knowing or caring about your cause) to where you want them to be (taking action on behalf of your cause). You will need a different message arc for each segment.

• The stronger the support of the audience, the shorter the message arc. For a neutral audience, you’ll need to create more messages.

  The stronger the support of the audience, the shorter the message arc.  For example, if an MP already supports women’s rights you can ask them directly to support your campaign.

• For a neutral audience, you will need to get more messages through to them. You might begin with something short and emotional to get their interest (like a YouTube video), then present some facts in an email so they better understand the problem, then ask them to take a small action, and then a larger one.
• Sometimes you will be able to create a message arc to convince an opponent to become a supporter, but your minimum goal is to turn opponents into neutrals: people who will not to action for or against your cause.

Understand supporter networks

4Though you can use digital technology to send a message to different audiences, these platforms also make it very easy for members of your audience to send your message to their networks of friends, family, and colleagues.

These supporter networks are essential for building your audience. Though you may only have 100 followers on Twitter, if half of those people share your messages with their followers, your audience could quickly reach thousands of people.

Fine-tune your messaging & provide a call to action

5Messaging will look different on different platforms — Twitter, blog, YouTube, etc. — but here are some key elements to remember when developing messages.

• Use emotion — outrage, shock, humor — to grab your audience’s attention.
• Use facts and statistics to make the problem specific and to establish your authority in defining the problem. You will likely need to do research.
• Define a solution. You first want people to care about your problem and understand it. After you’ve achieved this, you need to present a credible solution for how to fix the problem. People will take action only if they believe your solution will fix the problem and that their action will help to achieve that solution.
• Provide a call to action. Explicitly state what action you want your audience to do.

Gather data

6One of the nice things about digital media is that it’s easy to track information about your campaign. Tracking data like site hits, blog comments and retweets can help you know which messages are most popular and which are not. Here are some tools you can use to gather data.

To gather information about how people use your site, Google Analytics offers an array of free metrics. The application Crazy Egg shows you “heat maps” of which areas of your site get the most clicks.

BackTweets allows you to track how many people linked to your website on Twitter. You can track mentions of your cause by subscribing to Google Alerts on keywords related to your cause, which will be delivered periodically to you by e-mail.

You can also subscribe to blog and Google News RSS feeds on keywords related to your cause and then read those feeds on Google Reader.You can also search Twitter for mentions of keywords related to your cause.

In addition to collecting and aggregating data about your cause that is already out there, you can get original data by creating a free survey through one of the top online survey tools or one of the free embeddable polling widgets that you can put on your website. You can also poll people through SMS (“Text Yes to 465757 if you agree”).

In the digital world, there is no shortage of data. The challenge is to know how to collect and analyze it. Once you have successfully done this, you can abandon media tactics that are not working and put more attention into those that are.

Choose your technologies

7Now you’re ready to choose the technologies that you’ll use to get your message out and build up your campaign. Is your audience very wired or do many lack Internet access? How do you identify a target audience of online influencers who will get your message out to their followers?

How does your organization choose its messaging tools when trying to increase awareness for a campaign?

The post How to build awareness for your campaign appeared first on Socialbrite.

Bring authority & visibility to your site’s search results

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, educators — anyone with a website.

If your nonprofit team creates content on the Web, then your biggest challenge is to have people find you in search. And, let’s get super obvious here: That means you want them to literally click your link and arrive on your site, right?

Now, the first challenge to overcome is showing up on the first page of Google search results, given that about 97 percent of people never click through to the second page of results. (To dig deeper into search engine optimization for your site, see our articles on SEO.)

But the challenges don’t end there. If you create original content, someone, somewhere, at some point has ripped off your material and republished it as their own. Or perhaps they’re a partner site that has your permission to republish your content. Google, Bing and the other search engines often have a hard time determining who published it first and who’s the rightful owner. In other words, whose link should appear higher in the search results? Let’s call that the authentication challenge.

A third and final barrier for you to overcome is the differentiation challenge. Why should a user click on your link vs. the one right above or below it?

Claiming authorship to increase exposure & authority

The smarties at Google have come up with some solutions that you should be employing on your own website or blog, if you haven’t done so already. They’ve laid out a fairly simple process that you can follow to basically claim ownership of your own digital stuff. It begins with Google Authorship, also called Authorship Markup. Let me explain.

Google Authorship sounds daunting, but it’s simply a way for you to verify with Google that the content across the Web that you created is yours. Google will then show your content — and your authorship — in its “author rich snippet search results.” See the image at top for how this looks. Claiming your content will not only help you in the short run with better click-through rates for your content, but it will also help you to build AuthorRank with Google.

As social marketer Mark Traphagen writes: “All that content begins to contribute to a score that Google maintains for you that is their assessment of your trustworthiness, relevance, and popularity in your key topics. Once AuthorRank kicks in as a ranking factor, it will serve as an additional signal to Google that your highly-trusted content should rank higher in search.”

Now, this process is fairly straightforward when you’re the sole content creator at your site or blog. But what if you run a multi-author site or blog, like Socialbrite?

4 steps to tie Google Authorship to your Google Plus account

Google has outlined how this process works in only the sketchiest terms — and in a somewhat misleading way. (For instance, you don’t need a byline.)

Here are the four simple steps we took to claim Google Authorship on our multi-user blog:

1The first step involved gathering up all the Google Plus profile page urls of all my partners. It turned out everyone was already on G+. Here, for example, is my Google Plus profile page. It’s not a friendly url — you’re a number, not a name — so just copy and paste the whole thing. If you don’t have a G+ profile, go to http://profiles.google.com and click “Create my profile.”

2On your website or blog, you have to map each of your authors to their individual G+ profile page. For us, the simplest way to do that was to go into each writer’s user page in the WordPress dashboard and add this link to the Author tagline field:

Follow her on Google Plus

A few things to note:

• Author tagline is not the same across all WordPress themes, so there may be a different field that works instead, like Biographical bio, for instance. Test it out and see what works for you. (You can see how the author tagline displays at the bottom of this article.)

• Once you’ve gotten this working, you’re done — it’s a one-time task rather than something you have to insert with each post.

• Don’t forget to add ?rel=author to the end of the url (some people say that ?rel=me also works).

• The name you use on your site or blog (in the fields on your User page) should exactly match the name you use in your G+ profile.

3Instruct your contributors to go to their G+ profile page. Click on the blue Edit profile button, then scroll down until you see Contributor to. It’s easy to miss: Look for it between Other profiles and Links (see image at right). Click the Contributor to area, then Add custom link, and type in the name of the site and the url of the overall site, not your profile page on the site. For us, it was simply: Socialbrite and http://socialbrite.org/. Click Save, and you’re done. However, Mark Traphagen recommends that you add a + sign to the blog name and link specifically to the author bio page on your site. Our pointing to our home page may have worked because of the WordPress theme we use.

Optional plug-in step (if you need it): While our Twenty Eleven theme (and similar themes) is already configured for AuthorSure, making the use of an Author plug-in unnecessary, most WordPress themes out there will probably require the use of a plug-in. Options include Google authorship for multiple authors and WP Google Authorship plug-in.

4The final step is to test to make sure all of this worked. Go to the Structured Data Testing Tool (also called the Rich Snippets Testing Tool) and enter the url of one of your blog posts or articles. Examine the results to see if your author photo shows up.

Here is how Deltina tested one of her articles on our sister site, Socialmedia.biz:

A few final tips to optimize your content for Google search

Within a couple of days, when Google next indexes your site or blog, you should start seeing your author image appearing in search results on topics you’ve written about. This four-step process solves both challenges I mentioned at the top:

• Authentication: Google now knows, “Oh, you wrote this and it appeared on your blog, so we’ll display this post instead of a different post with the same content.”

• Differentiaion: Multiple studies have shown that users’ eyes are drawn to imagery, so your article will now attract more attention in search results. (See How optimizing my ugly Google+ pic increased free traffic 35%.)

Google Webmaster Tools outlines a series of steps to claim Authorship, as well as G+ author guidelines (thanks for the pointers, Kevin Marks!), but we think our 4-step process above is simpler, especially if you have a multi-user blog.

A few final tips:

• Thumbnail: Make sure you have a good close-up mugshot of yourself as the main image on your Google Plus profile page. This will be the image that Google pulls to insert into search results next to your blog post or article. Make sure it’s a photo, not a drawing, and one that shows your face, not a bucolic landscape or your pet. We read articles suggesting that your G+ profile image should be the same as your author image on your blog or website (if you use one), but that’s not true — at least, not for us.

• Public +1: On your G+ page, Google recommends adjusting your settings to make the +1 page of your profile public. That page displays anything that you have publicly “+1ed” on the Web.

• Results: Google doesn’t guarantee that your author photo will always show in results. Results may vary depending on a wide range of factors.

• Guest posts: Deltina suggests: “If you do a guest post on another blog, it is best to use the rel-author in your link back to your G+ account, and link from your G+ account directly to the article.”

• Other rel tags: You may want to dive deeper and learn how to create “rel=publisher” tags as well on your site. Here’s another pointer on how to add rel-publisher tags.

Make sense? Helpful or confusing? Let us know if you’re started using rel-author tags for your blog.

Cross-posted to Socialmedia.biz.

The post Why you should add author tags to your nonprofit’s blog appeared first on Socialbrite.

Targeted Facebook ads are taken to the next level

This is the second of a two-part series. Also see:
Part 1: How to target your donors or email subscribers with Facebook ads

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, educators, Facebook Page administrators.

Even if you don’t create a lot of Facebook ads, you can use Facebook’s brand new Power Editor to create custom audiences that integrate external data into your Facebook ad.

Haven’t heard of Power Editor? It’s a complimentary tool provided by Facebook that can be downloaded at the click of a button. If you manage multiple Facebook accounts or campaigns for your nonprofit, Power Editor might become your new bud, making it easy to create, edit, manage and optimize multiple ads at once.

Using Power Editor,  you can create a Facebook ad that targets your current donors by importing your list of emails for active donors.

How to Install Power Editor

• Use the Google Chrome Power Editor in Google Chrome extension. If you don’t have Google Chrome installed on your computer yet, you can download Chrome here.
• Install Power Editor by clicking here or going through Facebook’s Ad Manager.
• Open Power Editor.
• After you install Power Editor, a new browser tab will automatically open up: Click on the Power Editor icon on that tab to begin launch. If the tab doesn’t open up, learn more.

Are you using custom audiences yet? Let us know about your experience!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported.

The post How to install Facebook’s new Power Editor appeared first on Socialbrite.

]]> https://www.socialbrite.org/2012/07/19/should-nonprofits-bother-with-feedburner/ https://www.socialbrite.org/2012/07/19/should-nonprofits-bother-with-feedburner/#comments Thu, 19 Jul 2012 13:01:19 +0000 http://www.socialbrite.org/?p=20578 I‘ve been bloging since May 2001. I don’t remember when I set up my first FeedBurner account, but it was probably not long after it opened in February 2004 — and well before Google bought it. FeedBurner provides custom RSS feeds and management tools to bloggers, podcasters and other web-based content publishers.

The post Should nonprofits bother with FeedBurner? appeared first on Socialbrite.

]]>

Short answer: Yes for RSS feeds, no for email

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, educators, journalists, Web publishers.

I‘ve been bloging since May 2001. I don’t remember when I set up my first FeedBurner account, but it was probably not long after it opened in February 2004 — and well before Google bought it. FeedBurner provides custom RSS feeds and management tools to bloggers, podcasters and other web-based content publishers.

Back in the day, FeedBurner was the heaven-sent answer to setting up RSS feeds. Today, creating an RSS feed is still important, but every blogging platform worth its salt has RSS feeds baked in.

Where FeedBurner went wrong, in my view, was in its offer to capture email addresses for your nonprofit or business and send updates whenever you published a new blog post.

What many, or perhaps most, organizations didn’t realize in the bargain was this: FeedBurner captured all of those email addresses — but your organization didn’t.

This became apparent to us here at Socialbrite when we began to take a hard look at our email list. Why, surely we would be able to build on top of the 3,615 people who have subscribed to our email updates since 2009, right?

Wrong.

Since its purchase by Google in 2007 for $100 million, FeedBurner has disappeared into a black hole. There is no support staff — this, from a company that made $10.6 billion in earnings in its most recent three-month period. Development has basically been non-existent for several years. If you have a question, you’re supposed to post it to a Google Apps forum — but even there, more likely than not, no one will answer you.

So, in the next couple of days, we’ll be scrapping our “Subscribe by email” entreaty to you fine readers over there in the right sidebar, because we have no way of communicating with the 3,615 people who have done just that.

If you’re in the same boat, take a look at the email newsletter offerings from MailChimp, VerticalResponse, Constant Contact, Emma and other services, or at full-fledged campaign and community outreach services like Salsa, NationBuilder or Advocate Interactive.

Agree? Disagree? What’s been your experience? Let me have it in the comments below.

Update #1: I’m happy to hear that I’m wrong. We’ve been trying to find out how to do this for months, and no one from FeedBurner has ever replied. So, how do you view and export the addresses of your subscribers? Happy to update our post detailing how this is done. Here is all we see when we try to Export our subscriber list (SingleFeedStats) as either a CSV or in Excel:

Update #2: David Lee King provided this guide on where to find your FeedBurner email subscribers. Never would have discovered this in the FeedBurner dashboard on my own (thanks David!):

• click Publicize
• click email subscriptions
• click subscription management
• scroll down, click View Subscriber Details on the subscription management page
• click Export CSV
• Column A of the CSV gives you all the email addresses.

What’s interesting is that this means we have 1,562 people who subscribe to updates by email (and receive automated blog post updates from us) and 2,053 who subscribe to content updates via RSS. Here’s the screenshot of this page on FeedBurner:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.

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]]> https://www.socialbrite.org/2012/07/19/should-nonprofits-bother-with-feedburner/feed/ 8 https://www.socialbrite.org/2011/09/06/9-steps-to-getting-started-with-google-plus/ https://www.socialbrite.org/2011/09/06/9-steps-to-getting-started-with-google-plus/#comments Tue, 06 Sep 2011 13:01:55 +0000 http://www.socialbrite.org/?p=14503 Decide how to take advantage of the newest social network Target audience: Nonprofits, NGOs, cause organizations businesses, brands, bloggers, educators, individuals. Google’s new social networking platform, Google Plus, is still going strong since it was released at the end of June. Farra Trompeter at Big Duck created an awesome Slideshare presentation that outlined the steps to get your nonprofit started with Google […]

The post 9 steps to getting started with Google Plus appeared first on Socialbrite.

]]> Decide how to take advantage of the newest social network

Target audience: Nonprofits, NGOs, cause organizations businesses, brands, bloggers, educators, individuals.

Google’s new social networking platform, Google Plus, is still going strong since it was released at the end of June. Farra Trompeter at Big Duck created an awesome Slideshare presentation that outlined the steps to get your nonprofit started with Google Plus.

Here are nine ways to start off with Google Plus:

1Set up a personal profile. Google Plus does not yet support profiles for nonprofits, organizations or businesses. So decide which individuals at your organization can serve as representatives for your brand. Begin to connect with thought leaders in your field, and connect with people you already know. Note: You can ignore people after you add them to a Circle.

2Manage your privacy. One of the best things about Google Plus is that you can configure the security of each section of your Google Plus profile. This video will show you how to configure Google Plus’s privacy settings.

3Learn the features. Google has created an easy-to-understand guide for Google Plus. There is also an epic Google document with every tip and trick users have discovered, plus this useful website on Google Plus. I’ve also created a few video tutorials.

4Understand how it works. As with any social network, it’s important to understand both the functionality of the tool and community etiquette. As Beth Kanter points out, Google Plus allows for asymmetric sharing: I follow you, but you might not follow me.

5Consider what you want to add to the stream. Ultimately the value that you get from Google Plus is in direct proportion to the value you give. Before you share something, ask yourself: “Will this really be useful to people?” Google Plus can’t give you the mindset to put others before yourself, but it can give you the tools to share selectively.

6Segment what you share. Google Plus allows you to create Circles, which allow you to share more selectively. Watch this video for more on how Google Plus Circles work.

7Hang out with others. One feature nonprofit professionals are talking about is the hangout feature. This allows you to do videoconferencing with up to 10 other Google Plus users. Rob, Marc and I use it for our weekly 501 Mission Place planning calls, and J.D., Shonali, Debra and I use it for our monthly Socialbrite calls.

8Follow their interests.  Sparks is a feature within Google Plus that allows you to easily find useful content based on your friends’ interests. This will help you become someone people want to follow.

9Jump in or wait? There are many reasons why a nonprofit should start investigating Google Plus. And there are just as many reasons why the nonprofit should wait before diving in. Geoff Livingston writes: “Social media is entering a period where certain communities and demographics will migrate to some networks in favor of others. Organizations should choose the ones that make the most sense in relation to their mission.”

Have you started using Google Plus?

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]]> https://www.socialbrite.org/2011/09/06/9-steps-to-getting-started-with-google-plus/feed/ 2 https://www.socialbrite.org/2011/07/12/how-google-plus-can-help-nonprofits-connect-with-supporters/ https://www.socialbrite.org/2011/07/12/how-google-plus-can-help-nonprofits-connect-with-supporters/#comments Tue, 12 Jul 2011 13:02:28 +0000 http://www.socialbrite.org/?p=13150 A 36-second video explaining Google+’s new video conferencing feature. If you’re reading this and work for a nonprofit, you may not want to hop onto the Google Plus bandwagon – especially if your peanut butter is already spread too thin. However, if have time and you’re the curious type, go for it! As Andy Huston […]

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A 36-second video explaining Google+’s new video conferencing feature.

If you’re reading this and work for a nonprofit, you may not want to hop onto the Google Plus bandwagon – especially if your peanut butter is already spread too thin.

However, if have time and you’re the curious type, go for it! As Andy Huston suggests, “Experiment personally then apply professionally.”

Just know that the vast majority of your constituents will continue to be on Facebook for a long time.

2 ways Google Plus will change how you connect

Though it is early, there are a couple of features that stand out about Google+: Hangouts and Circles.

• Hangouts – Hangouts is a way to conduct group video conferencing with other Google+ users.

With Circles, Google puts segmentation up front in their product – and they make it fun!

I can see Hangouts creating a paradigm shift in how organizations connect with their supporters. Imagine key staff (the ones who can effectively represent the organization) posting “open office hours” where G+ users can pop into a Hangout and chat with them face to face about critical topics.

Here’s what Danielle Brigida of the National Wildlife Federation had to say about Google Plus in general:

• Circles – Facebook and Twitter both allow users to put various different people in specific groupings or lists. But how many people use or even know about Facebook friends lists? The same goes for Twitter. Circles, on the other hand, put segmentation up front in their product – and they make it fun!

I could see organizations segmenting their donors, volunteers, partners into a various different circles.

Here’s what Andy Huston had to say:

Social media is about people, not technology

If you’re messing around with Google Plus, or have decided to wait until the early adopters flush out the bugs, a few basic principles stay true:

• People use social media to connect with other people, not technology. When was the last time you felt truly understand and appreciated by your laptop?
• Social media is less important than your story and how well you can tell it. If you don’t have a good story to tell, having a megaphone is useless.
• Fish where the fish are. Right now, mostly the geeks and other uncool kids are using Google+. It remains to be seen whether Google+ will be adopted by the masses, so spend your time on the platforms (Facebook) with the people who love you.
• Also see Frank Barry’s article called Social Media Best Practices: 12 Tips for Making the Best of Any Social Site.

In short, stay interested in where Google+ is going, but don’t spend huge resources on it right now.

How do you see nonprofits using Google Plus?

Related

• How to get started with Google Plus and Circles (Socialbrite)

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